That answer had nothing about PSWs, nothing about nurses and nothing about the shortage of physicians in our province.

This government has allowed our health care system to fall into such dire straits that a little transparency would threaten our economic prosperity. This government is terrified that public sector workers will have more bargaining power than they will. They’re terrified that even the private sector, flourishing under their protection, could soon be holding them over a barrel, demanding higher rates.

Why? Because this government’s mismanagement has resulted in the highest demand for health care workers in our province’s history. If it sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same trademark mismanagement that’s got the demand for housing—pardon the pun—through the roof. This government can’t make progress on housing, and they can’t make progress on health care. All they can do is hide from the damage they’ve done and try to save their own skin.

Mr. Speaker, will the Premier give Ontarians a straight answer and tell them how many front-line physicians, nurses and PSWs our health care system is missing?

For the Premier, Mr. Speaker: The Premier campaigned on being transparent, ethical and accountable, yet six years after assuming power, his government has left nothing but a series of scandals in its wake, punctuated by backtracks and broken promises. Five ministers have resigned. Others have been banished from caucus. There’s an RCMP criminal investigation with a special prosecutor and judicial appointments for like-minded friends, with even a special office in Ottawa for a failed political candidate. Clearly, the gravy train is rolling full steam ahead with a new station in Ottawa.

So you’ll forgive me for being skeptical of the Premier’s taxpayer-funded self-promotional ads saying that everything in Ontario is okay. With shuttered emergency rooms and an unprecedented health care staffing crisis, he refuses to give details about our health care worker shortage, citing the risk of economic damage.

Will the Premier break his cone of silence and let his Minister of Health tell Ontarians how bad they have let our health care worker shortage really get?

For the Premier: I never thought I’d see the day when having a family doctor in Ontario made you lucky; when people paid hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars just to access primary care; when riding the subway meant being bombarded with advertisements for health care services that should be insured but aren’t.

Looking back at the last six years, a lot has changed. Now we have nurse practitioner-led clinics charging subscription fees to desperate patients while executive health clinics make a fortune in a primary care marketplace of this government’s making.

By 2026, 4.4 million people won’t have access to a family doctor, and we can’t even say that our emergency departments are always open anymore.

Mr. Speaker, with so little to show under his watch, why is it that the Premier only increased health care sector funding by 0.59%, but has more than doubled the amount that he pays the staff in his own office?

But perhaps “forgetting” is too generous because every time this government’s neglect brings another feature of public health care to its knees, there is always a private, for-profit model there to save the day. Whether it is exorbitant subscription fees to nurse practitioners or executive health clinics, whether it’s pricey Pap smears or costly cataract lenses, whether it’s staffing agencies gouging our hospitals and long-term-care homes, this government rolls out the red carpet for anyone praying to the almighty dollar.

Mr. Speaker, what should patients who can’t afford this Premier’s private health care agenda do once his gravy train has left our public health care system behind in the dust?

For the Minister of Health, Mr. Speaker: I’m tired of the people of Ontario getting ripped off by this government’s health care privatization agenda. When the Minister of Health welcomes private for-profit clinics with open arms, that’s not actually a surprise anymore. But when the Minister chooses to ignore blatant violations of the Canada Health Act, that is another thing entirely.

In October of 2023, it came to light that a nurse practitioner walk-in clinic in Ottawa was charging a $400 annual subscription fee to access fee-for-service care. And at the time, the minister told us that she would investigate. That was almost half a year ago, and in that time, many more clinics have popped up across Ontario, like the one in Ancaster that was announced just last month.

Mr. Speaker, her inaction is literally creating a market for health care profiteering in Canada and in Ontario. We must make good on the promise of primary care. How can anyone trust this government to manage our health care system, if it cannot even enforce the basic tenets of the Canada Health Act?

Even if we overlook the fact that it took six months for her to come up with that response, the fact of the matter is that closing the loophole, either through provincial or federal legislation, should be easy. Instead of taking the many measures at her disposal to make family medicine more attractive and accessible, to credential more foreign doctors, all the minister can do is brag about the conversations that she is supposedly having with the OMA and CPSO, with literally nothing to show for it. This government is more than happy to make patients pay while they appease private interest.

Mr. Speaker, will the minister stop placing the financial burden of primary care on patients and commit to funding it for everyone so that no one ever faces a fee, regardless of whether they’re seen by a family doctor or a nurse practitioner?

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker, for the Premier: 60 seconds isn’t enough time to list this government’s failures in health care, but let’s give it a try. What if I told you emergency room wait times are the worst they’ve ever been, and ER closures have become the norm? That’s because we’re losing family doctors faster than we’re gaining them, and thousands of patients are losing primary care overnight.

On top of that, Bill 124 has shattered our workforce for nothing—you sure got that done—and there’s still no health care worker retention plan, so now temporary staffing agencies have stepped in and are burning a hole in our hospitals and long-term-care homes. But the Premier says, “Just let it burn.” As a result, hospital debts are ballooning, and they’re being forced to rely on high-interest loans because this government does not have their back. And now, desperate patients are being forced to turn to private for-profit clinics that are overcharging elderly patients while this government turns a blind eye.

Mr. Speaker, why should this government trust any of the Premier’s promises when all he has to show for his efforts is this long list of health care woes?

The government loves to brag about all the money it spent on health care, but what does it have to show for it? You wouldn’t see me bragging about spending millions of dollars on a car that doesn’t start. This government has created a problem that it cannot fix.

Through you, Mr. Speaker, to all Ontarians: They’re not thinking about your future; they’re thinking about their future. They don’t care about bringing your emergency room wait times down, and they don’t care about emergency room closures. They don’t care about keeping your family doctor or your nurse practitioner. They don’t care about anything unless someone is making a profit, whether it’s temporary nursing agencies, private for-profit clinics, developers drooling over the greenbelt, private companies like Staples, Shoppers Drug Mart and Loblaws. This government will always lead with greed.

Mr. Speaker, when will this government realize they could give the people of Ontario so much more if they would only focus on people, not profits?

None of these things have done anything to keep ERs closed and have ignored entirely the root causes of what we’re facing, because right now patients cannot get access to primary care. They can’t get access to family doctors and family health teams. When they try to get out to nurse practitioners, many of them can only be accessed by paying $400 mandatory subscription fees.

This is about doing things like dropping the appeal of Bill 124 and putting in the work to retain health care workers with proper wages, benefits and mental health supports. This means regulating temporary nursing agencies. It means investing the billions of dollars this government is instead stashing away in contingency funds. We cannot afford to fail on this.

In September, three teens were stabbed at a house party in the middle the night. Rushed to the nearest emergency department, they found that it was closed. In the last month, there was a 10-day period where the emergency department in Chesley, Ontario, was open for only 10 hours.

What does the Minister of Health say to the people Ontario who live with the anxiety of not having an emergency room open in their times of crisis?

For the Minister of Health: There is a fundamental principle in emergency medicine that says following any major trauma or accident, patients have a one-hour window in which the right care means the difference between life and death. That hour is called the golden hour—just 60 minutes to save a life.

Yet, under this government’s watch, millions of Ontarians are being denied and robbed of their golden hour by the Premier and the Minister of Health. Under their watch, we’ve seen 911 calls go unanswered, ambulances dispatched too late, rampant and unpredictable closures of emergency departments—nearly 900 in 2022 and almost 500 by last August, and it’s only getting worse.

While the RCMP has rightly launched a criminal investigation into the Premier’s greenbelt misconduct, we are watching yet another scandal unfold in this government’s mismanagement of health care. When will this government do more than lip service and take a single concrete step to reopen shuttered emergency departments across this province?

My question is for the Premier. It seems that every time the Premier makes a major public policy decision, wealthy well-connected insiders always seem to come out on top. We saw it with the greenbelt, where a small group of insiders became billionaires overnight. Are we really supposed to believe that this decision was about 1.5 million homes and not about $8.3 billion? Accordingly, when it comes to the Premier’s expansion of private, for-profit health care, can we blame Ontarians for wondering where his priorities truly lie?

Mr. Speaker, this week, a walk-in clinic in Ottawa is operating that will charge patients desperate for primary care $400 a year just to have the privilege of paying for visits. We know that’s not the only one of these kinds of clinics popping up in Ontario.

To the Premier: While cash-for-access arrangements may be commonplace within this government, is it fair that he expects the people of Ontario to count this as the norm within their own health care system?

But I’d like to remind the Premier of a saying he has burned into the minds of Ontarians this year. He said, “All you need is your OHIP card—never your credit card.” It kind of reminds me of that famous video where he promised not to touch the greenbelt, and then he did.

History is repeating itself. Walk-in clinics like the one in Ottawa are just the beginning. Bill 60, which was executed swiftly just like the greenbelt, was said to be about clearing the surgical backlog, but it’s just another cash cow. It opens the floodgates for private clinics to profiteer on publicly funded surgeries, meaning the people of Ontario will be bankrolling clinics that have a financial incentive to provide the lowest-quality care possible.

Mr. Speaker, the Premier said that real leadership is about being able to admit when you’ve made a mistake. Will he reverse his decision on private, for-profit health care, the same way he reversed his decision on the greenbelt?

That’s not what stakeholder after stakeholder after stakeholder said during public hearings. What this bill actually allows is the simplest surgeries to be done for the highest price. They will be funded by our tax dollars—and it is the shareholders who will be laughing all the way to the bank. Meanwhile, patients will be left with lighter wallets since this government refused to put protections against upselling and up-charging in place. They refused. I find that strange, when the Premier insists patients will never pay with their credit card even though they already are.

So the bottom line is, this government isn’t about protecting patients; they aren’t about protecting our public health care system. All they are doing is protecting shareholders. They’re letting private for-profit companies have unfettered access to the demand that exists in our health care system.

So, Mr. Speaker, why won’t the Premier recognize the need to clear the surgical backlog and protect patients, as well as our public health care system, at the same time?

For the Premier: Bill 60 is reckless, incomplete and poorly conceived. It ignores the root causes of the problems in our health care system and fails to prioritize patient health over private wealth. Bill 60 could have been salvaged, but of 45 amendments I proposed, all were thrown out. When the government was asked to ensure that the bill allow Indigenous consultation, they said no. When they were asked to establish conflict-of-interest rules for directors who issue licences, they said no. They said no to protections against upselling, up-charging, profiteering and cycling of health workers out of the public hospitals.

Ontarians are outraged. I know this. I know government members are hearing it from their constituents, because when their constituents don’t hear back from them, they reach out to me instead.

So to every government member: Who will have the courage to listen to the people of Ontario and vote against Bill 60?

And to the Premier: Since this government isn’t serving the interests of Ontarians, whose interest is it actually serving?

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Health, who, in three days, plans to cut health care funding to the most vulnerable people in Ontario. In doing so, the minister is sending the message that those without OHIP do not deserve the same care as the rest of us. But this is Ontario. This is Canada. Everyone deserves care.

The reality is, most uninsured people actually are entitled to health insurance, but they face social and physical barriers that prevent them from getting an OHIP card. This government is singling out the people who need their help the most and telling them they would rather save a buck than fund their health care. Uninsured people will still get care once they are sick enough, and it is downright sad and not the least bit surprising that the minister is perfectly fine pushing the financial burden onto our already strained health care budgets.

Why does the minister think it’s a good idea to financially drain our public hospitals further, and why must she do it by draining the dignity of our patients?

In the week of March 12 to 18, there were almost 4,000 COVID cases in Ontario and 213 hospitalizations. What happens when that number begins to rise again next fall and all of this funding is cut and none of these programs are in place—no paid sick days, no hospital funding, no coverage for uninsured people? Who will pay for the minister’s cruelty and recklessness then?

My question is for the Premier. Yesterday, this government presented a plan for health care that inspired zero confidence that it would protect patients or ensure fair, equitable, timely access in our province. It avoided the root causes of our crisis and made a series of promises that we have no reason to believe will be acted upon.

I mean, why should we? This government promised they wouldn’t touch the greenbelt, and then they carved it up. They promised they would sign up 8,000 children to the Ontario Autism Program this year, and instead they just let the wait-list balloon and stopped reporting data. They told us there wasn’t a crisis in health care, even as at least 158 emergency departments closed across our province.

And now, the government is presenting a superficial plan for health care that makes vague promises about guardrails for some of the very same problems they have been consistently ignoring since they came into power. Mr. Speaker, why should anyone trust anything this Premier and government have to say?

We have already seen the poisonous effects of profits in long-term care, in which seniors died in droves. This government did nothing except introduce legislation to protect the most negligent operators and then award them more contracts. Now this government is enabling for-profit operators to siphon health care workers out of our public health care system. As Bill 124 pushes them out, temporary nursing agencies are pulling them out.

Many of these agencies engage in unscrupulous recruiting practices, like hiring out of parking lots, or they institute harmful contractual obligations that stop nurses from working in the location of their choice. Others engage in rampant price gouging, allowing hospitals to be charged three or four times the normal rates.

Will this government explain why they have not fulfilled their promise to take action on temporary, for-profit nursing agencies?

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas a basic principle of health care is that it must be patient-centred instead of profit-centred; and

“Whereas the introduction of profit in health care has consistently led to poorer health outcomes in Canada and around the world; and

“Whereas the introduction of profits and privatized health care creates a division between those who can afford it and those who cannot;

“We, the undersigned, call upon the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to enact the following measures:

“(1) Recommit to honouring and defending the Canada Health Act;

“(2) Guarantee that health care in Ontario will not be privatized;

“(3) Ensure that in every case, health care system decisions are patient-centred and not profit-centred;

“(4) Commit to solve the challenges in our health care system through public and not-for-profit initiatives.”

I support this petition. I am signing it and am pleased to hand it to page Yusuf.

Last week, the Minister of Health finally admitted what the people of Don Valley East have been saying for months, that the status quo in health care is unacceptable. What my constituents have meant is that ER wait times, when ERs are accessible at all, are unacceptable. Not having a family physician for 15% of us is unacceptable. And because of this government, there are too many foreign-trained health care workers in my riding who are not getting credentialed. This is unacceptable.

Now, the status quo that the Minister of Health opposes is our publicly funded, not-for-profit health care system. Though she asserts that Ontarians will be able to access health care with their OHIP card, make no mistake, the plan for private, for-profit delivery of health care will harm the people of this province.

We have already seen the harms from for-profit long-term-care homes in Ontario that had significantly higher mortality than not-for-profit. We have learned the harms from for-profit outsourcing of public health care in the United Kingdom, which led to significant preventable mortality, and we have learned the harms from for-profit dialysis centres in the United States. We have learned the harms from all around the world, as reported in Scotland, Australia, Italy, Ireland and even the World Health Organization.

The lesson in all of this is consistent and clear: Health care must always be about patients first and not profits.